One new study of climate change names the two most vulnerable regions on the planet–inland China and Florida. Guess they’ve already written off Vanuatu and some other island nations. Click here for summary.
But ignoring consequences will enable those Florida real estate prices to just cruise along. Do people imagine they will flee Miami for the Florida Alpines? For those ski lodges Disney will build at Orlando? One clear message–if you want visit Hemingway’s old house in Key West, do it soon.
Jiangsu Province in China is ranked as the world’s most vulnerable region (what about Tonga, you could ask) and it is now producing one-tenth of China’s GDP. Oh goody, factories at sea level. Sounds like many American oil refineries, Navy bases, San Francisco and Oakland and San Jose and Seattle and JFK airports, and… Of course, if there were enough money we could move everything and the rich people up to Denver and Omaha as the coastal resorts move upstream. The poor and the homeless can swim for it, or go back where they came from, whichever suits the Republican Party at the moment.
This report put Florida as #10 bad risk, after 9 Chinese provinces. Some other, obvious parts of the US got into high risk list: Florida in 10th place, with California 19th, Texas 20th and New York 46th. Nine territories from India were also in the top 50. It is time to build a wall, but not along the border, the dangerous impending flood is along the coast.
My curiosity (would love to come back around 2123); what about London, Aigues-Mortes, Calais, Rye, Dubrovnik, Amsterdam, Rotterdam, Venice and other flatland coastal places? Will Primrose Hill be a beach town finally?
So Rep. Green wants state succession? Let’s start with Florida, set her adrift, taking DeSantis along. Save trillions of dollars. Who’s gonna pay to move Miami and Disneyworld? Taxpayers, that’s who. Cheapest plan is to build fake mountain range down the archipelago before it’s archipelagone. Build it out of plastic skimmed from the oceans.
The killer quake in Turkey/Syria makes so clear how our species has succeeded in world domination, but has not deigned to admit that we don’t actually control everything. Volcanoes, earthquakes, storms, floods, wildfires–all these can be beyond our immediate control. Yet we mislead ourselves and our fellows into thinking this planet is ours. Sorry, but we belong to the planet.
Yes, we know the effects of global warming, of huge hurricanes or typhoons, of earthquakes or volcanoes. But we then pretend that everything we do is gonna work out fine. Put lead in paint and gasoline, asbestos into walls and ceilings, air pollution into city skies, all kinds of chemicals into rivers and ground water and oceans, plastic into our own bodies and everywhere else, endless CO2 into the atmosphere, and methane? Oh, that’s a complicated issue our grandkids may deal with, if they survive. We build at sea level and snarl when waves come in. We put Seattle and Naples and other cities at the foot of live volcanoes! The cities along rivers we do not entirely control couldn’t be listed in a two-hundred page book of legible-sized type. And then there’s climate and weather. We already know there’ve been huge shifts in the past: read about the Anasazi, Mound Builders, Hittites, Maya, Sumerians, et al. Back then those philosophical classic Greeks cut down all their forests to make ships…soon, with no trees, there was much less soil, and so on into demise.
We have been so clever. Agriculture and irrigation. Ships and planes, domestic horses and cars, big cities and even sewer systems, medicine and longer lives than they had in Rome (with their lead pipes!), we can build bigger and taller and dig deeper and have single huge cities now that out-number the entire hominid population a few ice ages ago!
The problem now is that we know so much. We are a quick and powerful and over-running species. There are more of us than any other larger vertebrate that has ever existed. We are a scourge and a self-absorbed destroyer. Did anybody think all those city buildings in Turkey and Syria could with-stand an earthquake of that unsurprising magnitude? Even building those flimsy cities was a gamble made up of arrogance, greed and irresponsibility.
Our tech and power and greed-based culture now means that we forge ahead with little concern. Consequences? Who cares about some big word with a “Q” in the middle? Build more, charge more, exploit more, breed more, grow the economy more…more, more, more. That has been our species’ drive from the start. Thus we overcame mammoths and lions, strong winds and long droughts. We shall overcome, a basic assumption of our species.
When I researched my San Francisco book I realized the Miwok and Coastanoans and Pomo had slowly worked their way down the food chain by hunting the biggest prey until it was gone. By the time Europeans explorers started making observations of wildlife in late 1700s, most of the hominid alpha predators had died off, wildlife had returned. At that brief interlude, California looked like a Garden of Eden. European culture soon ended that myth.
By the time Spanish enslavement missions spread up the California Coast most Native Americans had died–from unintentionally imported European pandemics. Wildlife seemed endless. What had taken Native Americans with their limited technology centuries was greatly accelerated by European tech and greed. Russian fur hunters occupied the Farallones, and in decades killed off most marine mammals. Those islands were almost beyond reach for Miwok. It took over 150 years for fur seals to return. Without deliberate protection, they’d soon be gone again. What Russian oligarch or North Korean potentate wouldn’t want an American fur seal parka? That Farallon massacre of wildlife was nearly two centuries ago. Imagine what one hunter with an AK-47 could do now?
So we forge ahead–breeding, building, destroying, polluting, breeding some more, building a lot more, shootign each other, inventing new drugs, sloughing off the plastic and chemicals and CO2 and methane and abraided tires and synthetic fibers and fracking chemicals and fentanyl and old medicines and hundreds of other inorganic pollutants into the only natural system that we know can support our lives. Unlike the lemming myth, we may be a truly suicidal species.
Latest Turkey/Syria official death nears 24,000–click here. We now know that officials whitewashed the real death toll after the SF quake in ‘o6. You can be assured that dictators in Turkey and Syria will do the same there. It will also be inhumanely fascinating to see which local and national officials end up blamed for the carnage. No building codes? No ambulances? No equipment for rescue crews?
“Can you change reality by screaming at it? The short answer is ‘No.’ Al Gore published ‘An Inconvenient Truth’ in 2006. At that time, there was a rabid discussion, pro and con, among a small number of people. The vast majority of people didn’t care because they were not currently affected. Similarly, they don’t care about the fate of the polar bear, the Willow Flycatcher, or the Furbish lousewort. They don’t cohabit with polar bears and haven’t seen one in the flesh; they cannot identify the Willow Flycatcher if they see one; and they have no clue as what a Furbish lousewort might be.
“The New Reality is: 1) We will not stop global warming. 2) Global economic growth is stopping and is about to become negative. 3) The global population of humans is about to decline dramatically.
“Being a voice crying into the wilderness is stressful, and largely ineffective. It may boost your ego as a demonstration of your moral and intellectual superiority. It may give you a group identity as you cry out in chorus with others like yourself. It will not change human nature. Those of us who think we have some insight into the future should have a conversation. Such things should be discussed. But demanding that individual humans conform to whatever model behavior you require will not work.
“We should focus on adaptation, not to attempting to change physical reality or human nature. If some form of the civilization that we have enjoyed is to survive, economic and political reform is needed, along with massive investments in infrastructure, new sources of energy, and agronomy.
“The biosphere will adapt to the Anthropocene Extinction Event, as it has for previous extinction events. We may not.”
Our species is the product of millions of years of evolution on this planet, not any Garden of Eden. Like crows and chimps we are predatory omnivores. That means we have become adept at figuring out what works to feed, protect and procreate us.
Our ancestors would not have survived in a world of megafauna without some advantage. We were small, slow and fragile. Imagine being a furless mammal during an Ice Age! So we took fur from better equipped mammals. And we developed knowledge and skills and teamwork that made us formidable. Our ancestors killed animals many times larger and faster. So co-operation, communication and brain power got us here. Those traits could yet save us, but we have some serious barriers.
Tribalism may no longer make sense when the whole world is changing. Slaughtering millions of climate refugees at some sacred border–is that a good idea for our species’ future? I have said before, I think the nation-state is as dangerous an invention as nuclear bombs. It may prevent future generations from the rational co-operation needed to preserve whatever technologies, knowledge, arts and cuisine that are worth carrying forward. This side of cave dwelling, future cultures will struggle to maintain much that we take for granted in 2023. Can Siberia, Alaska, Greenland and Canada grow enough grain for whatever population survives? Will the necessary minerals for tech still be mined, above or below sea level? Will there be the medical system to protect people from all the tropical diseases that will likely be global? Will social and political disruption from climate change just lead to an assortment of violent warlord states, each after its own survival vs. all others? Global blood sport–the ultimate World Series?
As Covid made clear, we hominids do best in rich, democratic countries when there is a crisis. But if systems and economies fail, can that wealth be maintained? Can the economy run on freshly printed money? Or money created through digital manipulations? I can imagine how a rapidly dropping population is positive for avoiding extinction–but if violence and pandemic and starvation take away the science and technology, the medicine and human care–what then? Back to the caves? Over all that, there is the whole refugee crisis miasma. The TV show “Madame Secretary” years ago did some programs around signing an international treaty designed to re-home climate refugees. How unrealistic is that? The list of xenophobic cultures is very long: Japan, India, U.S., Australia, Hungary, Russia, China… New Zealand has agreed to accept Tongans, leaving a few more than two hundred nations still in limbo. If I were in the state of Georgia would I want those DeSantis creeps from Florida?
It is now Kristol clear to some long-time Republicans that their political party is not only unblushingly sadistic and nihilistic (even old-fashioned McConnell will use all his tools to keep the Biden Admin from doing anything positive that voters might welcome), but may be both suicidal and masochistic. Read on…
Bill Kristol here. I’d like to share with you why I’m helping lead the Republican Accountability Project after a long career in Republican and conservative politics. I’ve seen a lot in my time in Washington. From high-level positions in the Reagan and Bush administrations to co-founding The Weekly Standard, I’ve spent more than 4 decades making the case for conservative principles. Then something changed. When Donald Trump became the Republican nominee in 2016, the principles I had spent my career championing suddenly were thrown overboard. The Republican Party became subservient to the whims of one man. I’ve been in Washington long enough to know that Trump and his enablers represent something different. Something dangerous. We’re committed to making sure no Republican escapes the choices they make in this moment. For example, we created the GOP Democracy Report Card to track every Republican legislator, and to see who chose to defend our democracy, and who chose cowardice. I’m glad to have you with us as we hold everyone in the Republican Party accountable, and defend those who did the right thing. Bill Kristol Co-founder, Republican Accountability Project
For a long time American political conservatism was dominated by those who were born wealthy or envied those who were, those who believed in few regulations on businesses, had faith in economic growth as a source of happiness and were champions of rugged individualism. The Sixties loosened public restrictions on sex, clothing, hair length, rock music, censorship and many other areas of behavior long narrowed under WASP-dominated American culture. That fostered a right-wing, religion-tinged reaction (see W Bush, Rumsfeld, Cheney, Trump and other Vietnam chicken hawks). Reagan was the mouthpiece for that set of beliefs in recent decades though many of these beliefs go back to the beginning of the U.S. The original sin of protecting slavery. The two senators per state, regardless of population represented; Wyoming=California. The Jeffersonian faith in a white, male yeomanry who owned land and was therefore deemed to be dependable and responsible, no matter that the land was wrested from Native Americans by violent genocide. Racism was baked in. A black was equal to 3/5 of a white man in writing in the sacred constitution. The patriarchy didn’t deign to mention women of whom there were zero in Constitution Hall as voting delegates. Jefferson, the ideal founding father, didn’t dare publicly reveal his black mistress and their bi-racial children. In general conservatism came to be the heart of the Republican Party, especially after Civil Rights legislation under LBJ drove the Confederacy away from the Democrats who, until then, had been the most racist, pro-slavery party since the early 1800s. Let us not kid ourselves, those civil rights laws were to quell the city protests and riots so LBJ could focus the National Guard and all American military might on his idiotic crusade in Vietnam. Going back to FDR, who did almost nothing about racism and locked up Japanese-Americans, all the social welfare legislation was done largely to prevent socialist revolt, done out of noblesse oblige. Just as his uncle, TR, was a ground-breaking conservationist so there’d be plenty of ducks and game for the wealthy to shoot.
Reagan was fed the lines and he delivered every one with Hollywood sincerity. Acting like a President was a pretty easy role, plenty of lackeys to do anything that needed doing.
When you can’t make them see the light, make them feel the heat.
We are never defeated unless we give up on God.
There are no great limits to growth because there are no limits of human intelligence, imagination, and wonder. [A pompous love note to free market economics that hates government regulation.]
Government’s view of the economy could be summed up in a few short phrases: If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. And if it stops moving, subsidize it. [From a man who did nothing to support jobs in America during eight years of rampant off-shoring. And he certainly never opposed the heavy subsidies of U.S. oil and gas companies, or Big Ag.]
Government is like a baby. An alimentary canal with a big appetite at one end and no sense of responsibility at the other.
No government voluntarily reduces itself in size. Government programs, once launched, never disappear. Actually, a government bureau is the nearest thing to eternal life we’ll ever see.
Reagan did make mistrust of the federal government a cornerstone of American conservatism. Racists had long clung to states’ rights to prevent spread of civil rights, but Reagan put anti-government emotion in the center of the faith. Right-wing political behavior is a faith, just like any religion. There is no proof of any deity and there is no proof of trickle-down economics, or businesses deliberately creating jobs or corporations acting for the good of the nation or the planet. There is no evidence that a roomful of MBAs will not cheat, lie and rig any system to get more money. That any oil company or chemical manufacturer will be careful with its waste. Deregulation is as faith-based as anything to do with a WASP’s Holy Trinity.
So now we have the Trumped version of American right-wing beliefs, more like those of 100 years ago—isolationist, racist (KKK reborn in 1920s), based in many deep fears (much of the Twenties here in the US was cursed by a belief that Bolsheviks were taking over thus the FBI and J. Edgar), the rich getting richer while the laborers ate shit, near total corruption at the corporate level (1929, 2008. …next?), idiotic tendency to compare the stock market to anything like the real economy, WASP self-righteousness (Prohibition!). Trump played to all the modern versions of that like Reagan had in his time. Beneath every B-grade actor is a fantasist and bullshit artist. But today’s conservatism depends on faith and stopping history. Very hard to maintain. Hey, racists: without immigration the US population will stop growing (see Italy, Japan). Hey CEOs: climate change can be neither ignored nor postponed. When Exxon needs federal aid to move its Texas operations from the coast where will the hands-off, anti-government crowd find their hideout? The demographics are fate. The fastest growing segment of the US population comes from racially mixed families—the quaint idea of some kind of racial barrier or purity is so passe. We have a blond nephew whose wife is Hispanic and they have two kids. Our youngest son’s wife is Chinese. They have two English-born sons. That’s our future. Not some boondocks redneck who won’t eat foreign food or drive a “foreign” car even if it was assembled in Alabama where there are no unions.
I do expect some level of violence, mostly isolated cases. The right-wingers are cowards (see chicken-hawk above). Old patriarchal systems get most violent when they are losing any of the control they took on faith. Examples: today’s Muslim fundies who don’t want women using cell phones or being free…the Catholic Church’s violent Counter-Reformation…China’s repeated attempts to squash freedom, religion or dilute central control…the Confederacy’s repeated violence against blacks…the crime syndicates that use violence to run some Central American areas—El Salvador, Guatemala, etc. Demographics are not in McConnell’s control. Republicans are now the slenderest of the three avowed political positions in America (besides D and I), sharply down from when 9-11 fooled some into hoping W could be an effective President. W’s 80% favorability did not last as long as it took him to invade Iraq. The U. S. numbers are going against the Republican Party and I can only hope covid keeps recycling those anti-vaxxers who think Trump ever told a single truth. And it was reassuring to hear Gen. Mark Milley report that he and the Pentagon were not going to back a Trump coup.
UPDATED UPDATE: Just cancelled my plans to move into a cheap Florida condo, oh shucks. Today word comes that near Orlando un-permitted repair work has been halted on condos there. County says you live therein at your own risk the wa;kways may collapse. Anybody wanna hazard a guess about how the remodelling was done at Mara Lago? Back at Surfside there are plans to quickly demolish what remains standing at the informal burial groiund that was once a condo…bet those evacuated folks will not be allowed to retrieve stuff left behind. Imagine the final dollar value of the lawsuits and settlements and then woonder over ow insurance companies will sue the condo owners to prevent havong to pay insurance claims after an Act of Man that was preventable. Reckless driving parallels rickless owning?
The vipers are alive and we have collectively clutched them to our breasts. Here’s is some of what I wrote: “These United States are devolving into an increasingly dangerous, disfunctional, delusional nation. We have embraced several poison vipers simultaneously. We have a politics viper that protects greed and a ‘free market.’ Free market really means ‘if you have the money, go for it.’ We generally avoid government regulation which is often portrayed by the free marketeers as simply ruinous interference with good business. And we all know that government bureaucracies tend to rely on experts and right-wing politics make it clear that experts are just here to impinge on our freedoms–from public health doctors to gun violence statisticians to climate change researchers. So in red states we hug the de-regulation viper and the lower taxes viper, hoping to starve government into total indifference. Even minimum wage jobs are always portrayed as endangered by what some politician in Washington or a state capitol wants to do… Then we add in the vaporous viper of misinformation and Putinesque burlesque via social media and you get US 2021. Misinformed, uninformed, trapped in a system rigged for the 1% and geared to ignore real dangers from pandemic to climate change to disintegrating condos.”
How will White House wannabe Gov. DeSantos try to blame this on Obama or taxes or immigrants?
The experts–constructuon workers and engineers–knew how bad the condo tower was. They pulled out! Isn’t that when a real honest organization would have evacuated its members? But think of the condo price deflation…
The condo owners clearly did not grasp their own personal danger and apparently the local city had zero concern. In a nation where expertise is derided and not respected, it’s not surprusing that everybody would try to deny the undeniable. It is classic de-regulation, laissez-faire, money-first American life. It has allowed Exxon and other fossil fuel firms to lie about climate change for decades. Clearly a forty-year delay between building and re-certififcation is totally bogus for Florida, where salt water intrusion, limestone and sink holes, hurricanes annually and well-knwon shoddy construction practices are widespread. Even just thirty year cycles might have saved over 100 lives.
Florida could be Brazil or Beijing or Belaruss. Florida is definitely us and U.S.
These United States are devolving into an increasingly dangerous, disfunctional, delusional nation. We have embraced several poison vipers simultaneously. We have a politics viper that protects greed and a “free market.” Free market really means “if you have the money, go for it.” We generally avoid government regulation which is often portrayed by the free marketeers as simply ruinous interference with good business. And we all know that government bureaucracies tend to rely on experts and right-wing politics make it clear that experts are just here to impinge on our freedoms–from public health doctors to gun violence statisticians to climate change researchers. So in red states we hug the de-regulation viper and the lower taxes viper hoping to starve government into total indifference. Even minimum wage jobs are always portrayed as endangered by what some politician in Washington or a state capitol wants to do. There are those viperous anti-government propagandists who will immediately claim that raising minimum wages will destroy all jobs in sight. Never mind that Seattle’s higher minimum wage has NOT sunk the Washington State economy. We also have millions of cops who are trained to shoot first. Then we add in the vaporous viper of misinformation and Putinesque burlesque via social media and you get US 2021. Misinformed, uninformed, trapped in a system rigged for the 1% and geared to ignore real dangers from pandemic to climate change to disintegrating condos.
We’ve been here before. Remember that amazing freeway bridge collapse in the Twin Cities? Seventeen years!!! before its collapse a government inspector said the bridge was structurally deficient. And a mostly blue state looked away, backed out of the driveway and headed onto I-35W. Oh well, gotta go to Starbuck’s, too busy to talk right now…
Florida is right now the best example of what our future looks like. The sea level is rising. Millions of people live along that state’s beaches within easy reach of the beach, and the seeping salt water. Cement and salt water are a deadly combo, see current Surfside disaster. Three years ago an engineering report warned of decaying cement in the basement of the rubble that was at that time still a 12-story condo complex. No government agency felt moved to require action after that report. Apparently the intended victims, residents, were not even told. Otherwise some of them would have tried to leave as soon as the buildings began to creak and moan before collapse. At least one resident might have hired a lawyer to try to make the condo association fix the building. Had one known. However, fixing such a structural problem would cost money and perhaps lower the value of all the involved condos. What do you suppose those condos are worth today? How can any profit-minded insurance company cover any building near the Florida coast? This is an Act of God, the God of Greed. That will not turn away the zillion lawsuits headed for Florida courts. Various forms of chicanery and malfeasance and deliberate negligence will be brought to light. The victims are not the poor and expendable in this case, as with Katrina, lawyers will be busy. It will fascinate those of us who recognize Poe’s “fascination of the abomination.” How will those supposedly right-to-life-loving right-wingers spin this so the victims are to blame? Not the fundamentalists’ chosen God, not Republican-run government agencies, not some shoddy construction or incoming salt water or climate change, not a Republican governor who has left local agencies to cope badly with a mega-disaster…rubble, on-going fire, evacuation of another tower. W had Katrina. Wanna-be Pres DeSantis now has Surfside. Good job, Ronnie.
Even two years ago I could not imagine the leading US Republican potentate in Congress telling corporate CEOs to shut up, just send the money. Oh, Mitch. Your party once celebrated “Money is Speech” as declared by the Supreme Court. Well, in the corporate world, speech is often money…what you say is what you reap. Your company must please and entice as many consumers as possible. Money knows no borders, no races, no religions, not even age of spender. Money flows as easily from one person as the next, regardless of who or what the spender is or will become. Somehow the Republicans think money should be neutral or simply right-wing? Even as a kid I had heard, “Money talks.”
With Republican defense of Georgia’s anti-voter law, and the same-time attack on Major League Baseball (have you ever watched a game recently? seen how many players are not white WASPS?), soft drinks, airlines, etc. we now have the Republican Party telling CEOs that while speech is money, you may not speak about certain Republican issues, like voter suppression. How many CEOs will betray sales and image and customers to please a jowly old potentate from Kentucky who’ll never be President or write a best-seller or even host a reality TV show?
Far beyond the marvel of the Republican’s most powerful persons attacking major corporations for not ignoring the actions of this increasingly anti-democratic minority party, is the marvel of that same party thinking they can raise their minority to the top and stay there, regardless of facts, demographics, reality and even age. In 2020 Trump got less than 40% of the youth vote in every crucial state. As old Republicans die off they are not being replaced by their grand-kids who are so less likely to vote Republican. Sure, gerrymandering can keep the Republicans as minority rulers in many state legislatures and the U.S. House of Representatives. The Constitution itself, bringing forward its original sin of slavery protection, favors little, red states over bluer big states in the Senate, but behold the “Georgia Lesson.” Even old Confederate states like Georgia and Virginia and North Carolina cannot welcome in business and jobs without the risk of importing people who are educated, maybe not even be white supremacists, who may have used a passport or bring along spouses or friends who aren’t white, don’t see Jefferson Davis as a great patriot or think John C. Calhoun a fine political thinker. Is McConnell’s nastiness toward corporate America the beginning of a public split because corporate employees often favor public transit, good healthcare, public schools, bumble-bees, monarch butterflies and clean water? Huge profit-making companies do not want trade wars, race wars, pandemics uncontrolled or broken-down highway bridges. They want things to work and be safe so people will spend more money. Reagan knew that, name his one great invasion… [Grenada, remember that?] Yeah, Ronnie acted tough, it was his favored role even while performing as President… but real war is not that good for most business. Sell trucks, not tanks.
The Republican Party has become so much a part of the Faux News unreality that the elephantine party now acts as if science and reality are matters of choice…believe what you want as long as it’s our way. “Alternative facts.” Do they think math is also a matter of choice? Liars can use numbers or ignore them, and then, somehow, Orwellian language goobledegook will make reality conform to fake numbers? As the federal government continues to push ahead with the campaign to control covid it will be harder and harder to sell the Reaganesque charade that government can only do harm, except when bombing dark-skinned people. Masks don’t matter. Forget about the dying of human sperm and plastic in your drinking water. Numbers can only be adamantly ignored if you wish to be a true AMERICAN REPUBLICAN. For the majority of us, numbers are often reflecting unhappy trends in reality and have meaning, political repercussions. Massive forest fires, the pandemic, global pollution of land, oceans, air. Coastal areas and islands that will become uninhabitable. Millions of climate refugees. The pending extinction of species from bees to bats, manatees to maybe man–just pretend all that matters is what bathroom some kid chooses to use? Or that insurance companies should continue to control your medical care and mine?
How long and how far can Repubs go in ignoring what most people need, want, believe?
I spent much of today thinking about the Republican Party. Its roots lie in the immediate aftermath of the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act in spring 1854, when it became clear that elite southern slaveholders had taken control of the federal government and were using their power to spread their system of human enslavement across the continent.
At first, members of the new party knew only what they stood against: an economic system that concentrated wealth upward and made it impossible for ordinary men to prosper. But in 1859, their new spokesman, Illinois lawyer Abraham Lincoln, articulated a new vision of government. Rather than using government power solely to protect the property of wealthy slaveholders, Lincoln argued, the government should work to make it possible for all men to get equal access to resources, including education, so they could rise to economic security.
As a younger man, Lincoln had watched his town of New Salem die because the settlers in the town did not have the resources to dredge the Sangamon River to increase their river trade. Had the government simply been willing to invest in the economic development that was too much for the willing workers of New Salem, it could have brought prosperity to the men who, for lack of investment, failed and abandoned their town. The government, Lincoln thought, must develop the country’s infrastructure.
Once in power, the Republicans did precisely that. After imposing the first national taxes, including an income tax, lawmakers set out to enable men to be able to pay those taxes by using the government to give ordinary men access to resources. In 1862, they passed the Homestead Act, giving western land to anyone willing to settle it; the Land-Grant College Act, providing funds to establish state universities; the act establishing the Department of Agriculture, to provide scientific information and good seeds to farmers; and the Pacific Railway Act, providing for the construction of a railroad across the continent to get men to the fields and the mines of the West.
In 1902, Republicans fascinated with infrastructure projects joined forces with southern Democrats desperate for flood control to pass the Newlands Reclamation Act. Under the act, the federal government built more than 600 dams in 20 western states to bring water to farmland. “The sound and steady development of the West depends upon the building up of homes therein,” President Theodore Roosevelt wrote. Water from the western dams now irrigates more than 10 million acres, which produce about 60% of the nation’s vegetables and 25% of its fruits (and nuts).
Democratic President Franklin Delano Roosevelt combined this focus on infrastructure development with the need for work relief programs during the Depression to create the 1933 Civilian Conservation Corps, which planted trees, built fire towers, built trails, stocked fish, and so on. In 1935, Congress created the Works Progress Administration. During its existence, it employed about 3 million workers at a time; built or repaired more than 100,000 public buildings, including schools and post offices; and constructed more than 500 airports, more than 500,000 miles of roads, and more than 100,000 bridges. It also employed actors, photographers, painters, and writers to conduct interviews, paint murals of our history, and tell our national story.
As the country grew and became more interconnected, pressure built for a developed road system, but while FDR liked the idea of the jobs it would produce, building the road fell to Republican President Dwight Eisenhower. Three years after he became president, Eisenhower backed the 1956 Federal-Aid Highway Act, saying, “Our unity as a nation is sustained by free communication of thought and by easy transportation of people and goods.” The law initially provided $25 billion for the construction of 41,000 miles of road; at the time, it was the largest public works project in U.S. history.
In America today, there is good news. The Biden administration has rolled out vaccines at a faster pace than anyone foresaw. Today, President Biden announced that health care workers have administered 150 million doses of the vaccine and, at an average of 3 million shots a day, they are on track to administer 200 million by his 100th day in office. He is moving the date for states to make all adults eligible for a vaccine from May 1 to April 19.
The vaccines have dovetailed with the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan from last month and the spring weather to speed up the economic recovery. Economists had expected a job gain of about 660,000 in March, but nonfarm payrolls actually rose by about 916,000. And now Biden has rolled out a dramatic new infrastructure proposal, the $2 trillion American Jobs Plan.
So why was I thinking about the Republicans today?
In this moment, Republican lawmakers seem weirdly out of step with their party’s history as well as with the country. They are responding to the American Jobs Plan by defining infrastructure as roads and bridges alone, cutting from the definition even the broadband that they included when Trump was president. (Trump, remember, followed his huge 2017 tax cuts with the promise of a big infrastructure bill. As he said, “Infrastructure is the easiest of all…. People want it, Republicans and Democrats.”) Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) warns that Biden’s plan is a “Trojan horse” that will require “massive tax increases.”
Biden has indeed proposed funding the Democrats’ infrastructure plan by raising taxes on corporations from their current rate of 21% to 28% (but before Trump’s 2017 tax cuts, that rate was 35%). It ends federal tax breaks for oil and gas companies, and it increases the global minimum tax—a tax designed to keep corporations from shifting their profits to low tax countries– from 13% to 21%.
This is in keeping with our history. Americans since Lincoln have proudly used tax dollars to develop the country. During Eisenhower’s era, the corporate tax rate was 52% (and the top income tax bracket was 91%). The Newlands Act was designed to raise money through public land sales, but in 1928, when Congress authorized what would become Hoover Dam, the Bureau of Reclamation began to operate out of the government’s general funds.
But it was Lincoln’s Republicans who first provided the justification for investing in the nation. In the midst of the deadly Civil War, as the United States was hemorrhaging both blood and money, Republican lawmakers defended first their invention of national taxes. The government had a right to “demand” 99% of a man’s property for an urgent need, said House Ways and Means Committee Chair Justin Smith Morrill (R-VT). When the nation required it, he said, “the property of the people… belongs to the [g]overnment.”
The Republicans also defended developing the country. In a debate over the new Department of Agriculture, Chair of the Senate Finance Committee William Pitt Fessenden (R-ME), famous both for his crabbiness and for his single-minded focus on the war, defended the use of “seed money.” With such an investment, he said, the country would be “richly paid over and over again in absolute increase of wealth. There is no doubt of that.”
As 2020 becomes a storied year in modern history, we can hope—be it cynically, honestly or foolishly—that 2021 will find some things on this planet getting better.
This has been a killer year. Pandemic. More Americans dying of drug overdoses. In the western states there was drought and wildfires. Here in Oregon we suffered forest fires, extremely unhealthy smoke-filled lungs, destroyed homes. Towns burned include Detroit Lake, Talent and Phoenix (how could the founders have known it would have to rise from the ashes at some distant future?).
I do not fall for the canard that the U.S. is more bitterly divided than before. I do, nonetheless, believe Trump in the White House has exposed the myth of the shared American Dream as an obvious falsehood, a fake news commentary if you will. We have always been a violently divided nation. Genocide of Native Americans so white settlers could take the land, beaver pelts and bison. Wounded Knee. Seizure of land from Californios after U.S. annexed the state. Slaves imported from Africa. A constitution that protected such slavery. Our very own civil war fought uncivilly and giving birth to the machine gun. Racial segregation and Jim Crow laws. Still no reparations to those whose ancestors were shipped here as human cargo and then mercilessly exploited. Prejudice against newcomers: Irish Catholics, eastern Europeans, Italians, Mexicans, Jews. All-WASP clubs, neighborhoods. Assassinations from Lincoln to Martin Luther King. KKK. Lynchings. Persecution of Mormons. Sacco and Vanzetti. Joe Hill. America’s Nazi sympathizers like Charles Lindbergh. Banning Asian immigrants. Internment of Japanese-Americans. 1929. Joe McCarthy. 1968—click here for one guy who says that was worst year ever. I lived through it as a draft dodger who refused induction. Bad but not the worst. 1861 gets my vote as worst year ever–you can look it up.
Birtherism. QAnon. Police who too often feel they have the duty to shoot dark-skinned people powered by their own training, fear and prejudice. I would venture to say that the nation has been getting less unified, as usual, since the end of World War II. A nation founded for religious and political freedom for white men and their households, now turned to worship of money, has a lot of serious flaws to self-examine. That is not a strength of this culture. Shut up, get to work, make more money. Even in the face of this deadly covid crisis, a whole wing of one major political party says it is ok to die for the good of the economy. At the same time this same party pretends to be the only one to support Christian values. Whatever happened to “Do unto others…”? Maybe I should look at some modern Bible text to see how that’s been reinterpreted to suit warlord capitalism.
Global capitalism–with help from our Supreme Court: money is speech and corporations are people–has further corrupted our money-based election and political system. There is no longer any discernible line between large donation and bribery. What Trump has made painfully clear is that much of American law and justice is totally dependent on the quality of people in power. The separation of powers looks good in a textbook, not so good in reality as a President moves money around to build a wall on the border that no Congressional vote ever approved.
Beyond mere corruption and arrogance there has been an explosion of incompetence in the past four American years. Bad covid test kits from the CDC. A pathetic lack of organization in the distribution of vaccines now available. And Republican values (money, money, money) are screaming from news reports—one place in Florida is offering first-come, first-serve vaccination for old people who are now lined up in wheelchairs! Welcome to our reality version of “Game of Thrones”.
Covid is the most indelible fact about 2020, here and globally. Trump will be little more than an acerbic footnote in a 2120 history book if ever there should be one. Covid is part of a great human tradition. Plague. Typhoid. Malaria. Chlorea. 1918 flu pandemic.
Disease had a major role in the settling of white people onto lands once populated by Native Americans. In 1803 President Jefferson sent Lewis & Clark and their men out to explore the Louisiana Purchase we had bought from France. Sure, there were still millions of Native Americans on the land, but they went with the beaver and elk and pelicans. Within thirty years much of the western two-thirds of the eventual US had been de-populated. Former villages along the upper Missouri River were ghost towns by the 1830s. Diseases brought from Europe decimated native tribes with little or no resistance to these new diseases. Yes, the Spanish and Mexican Missions enslaved California Native Americans, but even then in the late 1700s the locals were dying in epidemics, tribe after tribe.
Nation state failure—I’ve come to view the nation as one of man’s most dangerous inventions.
Some effects of the pandemic may be good. Online workers are pursing flight from cities—distance earning. Emissions are down as fewer people need to go to the office. If we can get all those delivery trucks to go electric…
I expect the GOP rediscovers penury and budget deficits as a curse, a crime, a form of treason. Anything to keep Biden’s Administration from spending money to help people and smaller government units—towns, school districts, states.
War on drugs—this idiocy should stop. It was started in 1971 by Richard Nixon, largely as an anti-hippie slogan to use before older, white audiences. We are making drug cartels ever more wealthy, violent and powerful. Legalize and treat. Guns won’t keep people off drugs, ever. If we legalize we can test heroin, et al. for fentanyl. Our attempt at Prohibition a century ago should tell us all we need to know. Remember how the anti-pot forces warned that drug cartels would take over Colorado when it was legalized? Nope, efficient local farmers and licensed businesses get product from field to user, and now most of the products are NOT smoked into sensitive lungs. The same could happen for other drugs and treatment for those addictive ones could be open and accessible.
Our technology has outpaced regulation and understanding—social media used by Putin and nihilists to lure the gullible. Our modern auto tires break down and leach a toxic chemical into streams killing salmon. Our foods and drugs and cosmetics are full of crap we don’t know anything about. Styrofoam and plastic pollute our oceans and is not recycled. We are on track to destroy most life on this planet, including that of our progeny. Climate change. Nobody has an answer for what we do with tens of millions of Bangladeshi when their land is under the ocean. All those seaside navy bases, all those homes built in western forests, all the coastal airports built on fill land…
Happy New Year…we need renewed hope and effort and honesty toward ourselves and others. We can’t buy the future we need, we might try to create it.
My first-ever Biblical quote on this blog: “For the love of money is the root of all evil.” King James version, Timothy 6:10
Today life on Earth seems uncertain as we wobble into the Sixth Extinction. There are apparently record temps in Siberia this year, meaning more released methane as permafrost, loses both the perma and the frost, then fire dangers increase which would bring more unneeded smoke and ash to help heat the atmosphere which will then produce more heat and longer summers, and…well, you get the pic.
As of Tuesday, Dec. 10; I am now convnced that Homeland Security is a large building full of people who order pizza all day. Any pretense if zsecyurintg he hinmeland may be just a pretense. There are less than one thousand Saudi men here in military training yet this killer got a hunting license then bought a hand-gun (what was he gonna hunt? Bullfrogs? Humans?) and posted radical messages online but no body was paying attention. Here is piece on his social media rantings that we now know about when it is too late to do anything but gnash teeth.
Pensacola and The Afterwards
Is the current regime in Washington flirting with self-destruction? We know from his personal history of serial divorces, affairs, bankruptcies, “non-profit” foundation corruption, fraudulent “university”, sexual assaults and pathological lying that this President is drawn to high risk and nihilistic behavior, damn the consequences. I have written about the current right-wing politics as being cult-like in its following of a single person. Now that cult is being tested.
All along the Orange Cult has pretended to be Christian. Now the leader has become a mouth piece for a radical Muslim regime in Saudi Arabia in a case that involves a Muslim murdering three American naval aviators and shooting several more people at the Pensacola navy base. One prop of the Orange Cult has been its demonizing of Muslims. Now can the cult followers reverse and begin apologizing for Saudi murders as they have learned to do for Putin and Russia? How flexible are these Orange Cultists in the face of a terrorist attack? Have they a limit or are they so enthralled or enmeshed with their leader that they will follow him and bow to the Saudi king? Right now it seems the members of Orange Cult are NOT happy with a Saudi guest murdering American military members.
Can The Donald survive the Pensacola shootings? Or is he the fourth victim, politically speaking? We know that our President has never really condemned the Saudi dismembering of journalist Jamal Khashoggi last October. I fear the President is jealous that he can’t do the same to some American news people he hates.
Can Trump bring himself to condemn Wahabbi fundamentalism? Apparently the President doesn’t have a clue what global warming really is. And nobody will show him pictures of Mara Lago under water. Here we have the same issue. Probably “Wahabbi” is a word he has never seen in print. Maybe a couple cartoon drawings of 9-11 and the ideology of those terrorists could make it understandable for the man in the White House if he would deign to look at the pictures.
So now in the White House we seem to have an apologist for Saudi dictators, showing little concern for Navy victims or their families, fellow servicemen. Just like the way The Chosen One apologizes for Russia being persecuted over witch hunt on 2016 election tampering. Love those dictators. Maybe he sees the U.S. Navy as part of the “Deep State” as they have all those submarines.
We can rest easy that those “do-nothing Democrats”, as Tweeter-in-Chief calls them, have not managed to scuttle the revered Second Amendment and even a visiting Saudi can buy the gun he needs when it is time to kill and be killed. Amen.
Veblen21 